The Book: 2004 Baseball

<blockquote><p align=justify>GREEN AND ARDOIN DRAFTED ON FIRST DAY OF MLB AMATEUR DRAFT

LOUISIANA La. - The University of Louisiana at Lafayette's baseball program had two players taken during Monday's first day of the 2004 Major League
Baseball Amateur Draft.

Senior pitcher Patrick Green was drafted in the seventh round by the American League's Kansas City Royals at the 205th overall pick while junior pitcher and Eunice native Kevin Ardoin was picked up by the Texas Rangers of the American League in the 12th round at the 351st overall selection.

Green, a transfer from the University of Tennessee, is out of collegiate eligibility while Ardoin has one year of eligibility remaining at Louisiana.

Their selection marked the 10th straight year under head coach Tony Robichaux that the Cajuns have had at least one player drafted in the MLB Amateur Draft. Green's selection gave the Cajuns back-to-back seasons with a player drafted in one of the Top 10 rounds.

Ardoin, the Cajuns Friday night starter this past season, struck out 95 batters in 106 innings while notching a career-best six victories.

He took home Sun Belt Conference pitcher of the week honors on March 2 and April 12 and was also named College Baseball Insider National Player of the Week on March 5 after puzzling regional participant Stony Brook. Against SBU, Ardoin allowed a lead-off single before retiring 27 consecutive batters, 12 by strike out.

The right-hander left the game with a 2-0 lead at No. 9 Wichita State, going 7 1/3 innings while scattering six hits and striking out four.

Green missed the first part of the season with an elbow injury, but bounced back to collect six wins and a save in just 15 appearances.

He came out of the bullpen most of the season, but started five games including key contests down the stretch. Green tossed a complete game allowing just eight hits while striking out 10 in a win over New Mexico State at the Sun Belt Tournament in his last outing in a Cajuns uniform.


The Alpharetta, Ga., native posted a 2.12 ERA and opponents managed to hit just .191 against the hard-throwing right-hander. He finished the season with 55 strikeouts over 51 innings.

The 50-round draft continues through Tuesday, June 8.

<center><b><i>LOUISIANA SI

<blockquote><p align=justify>LOUISIANA La. - University of Louisiana baseball senior pitcher Austin Faught was chosen by the American League's Texas Rangers during the second and final day of the 2004 Major League Baseball Amateur Draft Tuesday.

Faught, who did not pitch during the 2004 season as he recovered from offseason arm surgery, was selected by the Rangers in the 43rd round at the 1,279th overall pick.

Texas picked up the lefthander for the second straight season. The Rangers took Faught in the 35th round of the 2003 MLB Draft, but the Houston native chose to return to UL Lafayette for his senior season.

Faught played two seasons at the University of Houston before transferring to Louisiana-Lafayette during the summer months of 2002. As a junior, he pitched for the Cajuns in the 2003 season. As a senior in 2004, he took a medical redshirt leaving him with one more season of eligibility remaining.

The lefthander went 4-3 with a 4.08 ERA in his first season with the Cajuns in 2003. He made 14 appearances and had nine starts.

He struck out 43 batters over 46 1/3 innings and collected the win in the Cajuns series-clinching win over Florida International on Easter Sunday going the distance and allowing the Golden Panthers just four hits while fanning seven hitters.

Before joining UL in 2003, Faught was a Freshman All-American at UH and was an All-Conference selection for the Cougars during that freshman campaign.

His selection by the Rangers gives the Cajuns baseball program three players taken in the amateur draft, joining fellow pitchers Patrick Green (7th round, Kansas City Royals) and Kevin Ardoin (12th round, Texas Rangers) as Cajuns drafted in the 2004 MLB Amateur Draft.

Since Tony Robichaux took over the reigns at Louisiana-Lafayette in 1995 a grand total of 23 players have been drafted and at least one player has been drafted each year.

An email from a friend in Alabama says they are going after our baseball coach. Can anyone confirm?

I can not confirm but I heard Jay talking about Auburn listing the South Alabama coach as a candidate. Jay also said that it is very unlikely that the South Alabama head coach is going anywhere. I think I would have to say the same about Robichaux. Robe is a Cajun.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Turner
An email from a friend in Alabama says they are going after our baseball coach. Can anyone confirm?

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Can't confirm.

This is the first I hear of it, however I'm not surprised to hear a coach of his caliber being mentioned.

Hey Auburn,
Hands off Robe! We don`t want another set of Tigers as rivals! j/k. NO really, hands off. Robe`s gonna kick some ~~~ next season!

Nooooo

PAY the COACH

Tony hasn't come up anywhere that I have seen. All the Aubie fans are keen on Ray Knight, but the early front runners seem to be:

Coach Lowe from AUM:(has been contacted)kinda old though
Brian Shoop Bham Southern: will be hot commodity after gtting his team in the NCAAs
Jamie Shoupe: doubt we will get him
Steve Kitrell head coach from South Alabama: that program speaks for itself...
Tim Corbin-Vanderbilt Head Coach
Mike Bianca - Head Coach at Ole MIss..(has expressed interest)
---from the Auburn board

Auburn has THE best baseball facility in the SEC and probably the nation. They are going to go for top coaches w/ consistent post-season success.

<blockquote><p align=justify>North wants change
Gannett News Sevice

June 29, 2004

OMAHA, Neb. – It may continue to be a cold day in hell before a Big Ten Conference baseball school finally reaches college baseball’s heaven here at the College World Series, unless global warming increases drastically or the schedule is changed.

The last one to make it here was Michigan in 1984, and Big Ten commissioner James Delany and his coaches blame the weather.

They and other northern schools are pushing a proposal to the NCAA that calls for uniform, later practice and play starting dates of Feb. 1 and March 1, respectively, to if not even the playing field, at least clear the snow off of it.

The later start time would push the CWS to the Fourth of July. Limiting fall practices is also in the works.

Texas and Cal State Fullerton are squaring off this weekend in Rosenblatt Stadium for the national title, marking the 10th straight year that a southern or sun belt school is in the championship round.

Oklahoma in 1994 is the last national champion that could be called a cold weather school. The last Big Ten school to win it all was Ohio State in 1966, climaxing a run of seven Big Ten national champions since 1953. The CWS began in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1947 before moving permanently to Omaha in 1950.

“If you look at the last 25 years, 20 percent of the country has controlled what’s gone on in Omaha,” said Ohio State coach Bob Todd, who has dominated the Big Ten for 15 years but the closest he ever made it to the CWS was a Super Regional in 1999. As a Missouri assistant from 1974-83, he also never made it.

“Abner Doubleday when he invented baseball didn’t expect them to be playing it in February and March in New York,” Todd said.

St. John’s in 1980 is the last New York school to make it, and that was during the span of 1950-83 in which the NCAA baseball committee chose one team from eight geographic districts. Todd, meanwhile, has been swinging at southern windmills since the 1970s.

“I can show you notes when I was in the old Big Eight at Missouri when we were trying this,” he said. “This is not a new concept.”

Neither is the weather.

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In February and March in the Big Ten and in other nearby conferences, baseball teams deal with snow and cold temperatures while Southeastern Conference and Pacific-10 schools and some from the Big 12 are playing. Northern schools have to travel to the south early in the season to get in their maximum of 55 regular-season games. Ohio State, for example, did not play its home opener until April 2. LSU, meanwhile, had already played 16 home games by then.

Northern schools playing in the south, on paper, solves the problem, but their RPIs (ratings percentage index) melt in the sun.

“The critical factor to this is by an April 1 date as it is now, northern teams haven’t even been on a field to practice and yet they’ve played 25 games down south,” Todd said. “They’re playing without practicing outdoors because if you don’t play 56 your at-large possibilities with the RPI are hurt, but if you play without practice you get beat.

“Then it’s hard to make up your RPI against other teams in the same situation with low RPIs. Meanwhile SEC teams feed of the others’ RPI. That’s almost 40 percent of your games without practice.

“It would be like telling Nick Saban that we want you to still to compete nationally, but yet we’re not going to let you practice outdoors. You have to practice in a gym. I don’t think he’d be very happy with that.”

Delany has been so unhappy with the present state of college baseball that he has considered a separate “Snow Series” championship, downgrading baseball in his league or getting rid of it all together.

“Competitive equity in baseball is an oxymoron,” Delany said. “If we can’t get some competitive changes, we’re going to have to figure where we go from here. Since 1983, 93 percent of the teams in Omaha have been from 14 southern or sun belt states.”

Is that the College World Series or the College South Series?

The newly formed NCAA baseball issues committee met Monday in Omaha, but the feelings on the proposals fall on North-South lines as fervently as did the Civil War.

“No, I don’t think starting the season later is going to get more Big Ten teams here,” said LSU athletic director Skip Bertman, who won five national titles at LSU from 1991 through 2000. “They already changed the format (in 1999) to 64 and no Big Ten schools made it, and northern schools did get to Omaha like Notre Dame, Nebraska and SW Missouri State. So anybody can make it now, and the Big Ten hasn’t.

“The Big Ten schools need to make a commitment like Nebraska did. They need to go out and build a stadium and get a baseball coach and treat him like a basketball coach. And say, if you don’t win, we’re going to have to make a change.”

Texas coach Augie Garrido, who is going for his fifth national title this weekend, can sympathize with the Big Ten coaches because he coached at Illinois from 1988-90.

“It was hard to recruit pitching because of the cold weather,” he said. “Anybody who can really pitch gets talked out of pitching in cold weather. And not getting to practice on a field really hurt. I can sympathize with them, but I’m not going in that direction. If we move this season back two weeks, we will be melting in hell in Austin. And here, too. No, I do not think the season should start later.”

A Texas A&M player had to leave a Super Regional game three weeks ago in Houston because of heat problems. July 4 in Omaha is generally 10 degrees hotter than June 4.

“It’s a whole lot easier to adjust to heat than cold,” Todd said.

“I do not think the northern schools are going to draw in baseball, no matter when they start,” Garrido countered. “Because there is no baseball mentality or culture in those areas. They don’t go to games until the summer. Two weeks isn’t going to help. And they’re not going to start selling tickets because it’s 40 degrees instead of 30.”

Hockey, which is played indoors, has been mostly a failure in southern states because of a lack of hockey culture in the south.

“Exactly,” Garrido said. “In other words, it just doesn’t compute. Kids don’t play ball up there until summer. They won’t develop a fan base. It’s just not going to happen.”

The CWS has been two weeks later since 1999. Another push could rob more of the athletes’ diminishing summer that can include summer ball and a rookie year of pro ball.

“I like it how it is now,” South Carolina catcher Landon Powell said. “College baseball players don’t have a lot of summer anyway. Two years ago, we lost to Texas in the national championship game on a Saturday. I flew out the next morning to play for the USA Team until August 16. I started school on August 17. So I had no summer.”

Georgia coach David Perno says don’t mess with a good thing.

“No, don’t move it,” he said. “I can see them changing the starting date, but don’t change the world series. Let’s play 50 or 52 games or if you want to play 55, just play five games a week. But don’t move Omaha anymore. That’s asking too much of these kids. It’s late enough as it is. If you start pushing until Fourth of July weekend, we’d just be playing the regional now. That’s ridiculous. I think it’s absurd.”

Playing so late also would also mean that most of the baseball players’s season would take place while school is not in session, which means they’re out of room and board for two more weeks. The baseball committee estimated Monday it costs about $8,000 a week to feed and house athletes. That would be about $16,000 for the additional two weeks, not to mention a philosophical problem for the presidents.

“If they change the schedule it’s going to create some other monsters on the other side that they haven’t thought about,” Garrido said. “What do you think the academicians are going to think about playing a sport when there is no education going on at all? It would put the academicians in an uproar, and I don’t think the presidents could handle it.”

So the south will rise again and again in Omaha and the north will be out in the cold?

“Let’s face it, you cannot make things equal,” Garrido said. “Things are not equal. And things are not even fair. So forget about it.”
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<blockquote><p align=justify>Bertman: Sounds like BCS notion


June 29, 2004

OMAHA, Neb. — So why all of a sudden is the northern bloc fighting for competitive equity in college baseball? It’s not like the southern bloc just began dominating last year.

After 1983, which was the last year that teams were selected by geographic regions for the College World Series, southern or sun belt schools have owned Omaha.

“It’s like Tulane suddenly wanting to get into the BCS (Bowl Championship Series),” LSU athletic director Skip Bertman said. “That’s basically a mini version of what we’re talking about. The Big Ten wants a piece. They see now that college baseball can be a money maker. Some schools want a piece of the pie that schools like LSU and South Carolina have been getting. The coach at Ohio State (Bob Todd), for example, says he can draw for a Michigan game or for some other league games, but it’s too darn cold so they want the schedule started later. So it’s really about money now.”

Interestingly, Big Ten commissioner James Delany, who has been leading the Big Ten’s baseball charge against unfairness, is a chief power broker of the BCS that shuts out many schools like Tulane from its elite dance, or treats them like Big Ten baseball schools.

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Suddenly Delany thinks he’s Tulane president Scott Cowan, whose war against the BCS has resulted in another BCS bowl in the near future that could include second-tier schools like Tulane and Miami of Ohio.

“It’s not right what the southern schools get to do in baseball,” Delany said.

“It’s a lot like the BCS,” Bertman said.

But how did the Big Ten get so desperate? The weather is no colder in the Big Ten than it was 20 years ago, which was the last time a Big Ten school (Michigan) reached the CWS. So what happened to the Big Ten bloc, which won CWS titles in 1953 (Michigan), 1956 (Minnesota), 1962 (Michigan), 1964 (Minnesota) and 1966 (Ohio State) but none since?

Many may not have realized it at the time, but when the NCAA did away with the geographic region selections to the CWS it used from 1950-83, it spelled the end for the Big Ten and other northern schools like Maine, which reached Omaha five times between 1964 and 1983 but has not returned since 1986.

“With all due respect, Maine was a very good baseball program, but they got here on a regular basis as did Northern Colorado (10 times before 1975) and Minnesota (five times before 1978) because until 1984, it was strictly advance by region,” said Dennis Poppe, the NCAA’s director of baseball and football championships who also works with the BCS. “The national selections changed the landscape of college baseball. Another factor was ESPN televising more in the 1980s, and it became more of a national event.”

Southern and Sun Belt officials also saw the light quicker than their northern brothers.

“They saw baseball’s revenue potential as a way to offset increasing costs because they had built-in weather advantages,” Poppe said. “There’s some excellent baseball facilities down south more than north. If you’re going to be a golfer, you’re going to go where you can play year round as opposed to four or five months a year. And you had the right people in the South. You had the Ron Frasers (Miami), the Ron Polks (Miss. St.) coaching, and you had hires like Skip Bertman. You had the guys who knew how to market the game.”

Now, Bertman says, others want a corner of the market before it’s totally cornered.

“I just don’t want them bringing LSU and the SEC schools down to help schools that might not be interested in baseball anyway. There are a lot of northern schools that don’t give a darn about baseball,” Bertman said.

“What we want is college baseball to grow,” Todd said. “We want it to be better. We think it can be better by leveling the playing field so northern teams can play in better weather. We think it can become really a national pastime.”
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I think that proposal will benefit everyone b/c the later the BB season starts the later it will end, meaning less time without the "big three" like we have now (no football, basketball or baseball).

I'm all for it.